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Dr. Leda's Rose Journal |
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Spin, Baby, Spin: The Joys of Being Obsessive
By Dr. Leda Horticulture, O. R.
January, 2005
Dr. Leda teeters dangerously close to the thin line separating passionate enthusiasm from pathological lunacy...and survives!
The other night at the gym I was trying to do a one-armed pull-up. This is an extremely challenging feat that I've been struggling to accomplish for several months now. Progress is painstakingly slow, but in the process I've increased my upper body strength and developed a monster grip. I confess that, being just a tad histrionic, I'm especially partial to one-armed pull-ups because they're one of the few exercises in the weight room where a petite middle-aged female has a major advantage over the hulky young testostero-guys. And one of life's greatest pleasures is being able to say "Nyah, nyah, nyah!" to a room full of overdeveloped power lifters. (Continued...)
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Anyway, after a while I noticed that one of the hulkier gym regulars, a huge testostero-guy whose name isn't really Sherlock but we'll call him that here because he'd probably break my bones if I used his actual name, was watching me.
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| Dr. Leda takes up boxing |
"Hey, you're trying to do a one-armed pull-up," he concluded after a few minutes. Well no Shinola, Sherlock. What'd you do, count on your fingers? (I didn't actually say this out loud, since Sherlock looks like the sort of fellow who could strap the Empire State Building to his testicles and tow it out to Staten Island and back in twenty minutes doing the butterfly stroke.)
"You've been working on it for six months now," he observed. "And you're not getting anywhere. Which could mean that you have an obsessive personality disorder. You probably ought to get that looked into."
Whoa! One minute I'm a healthy fit woman enjoying a difficult athletic challenge, and the next minute I'm the Miss December centerfold for the DSM-IV. For a moment I dangled helplessly from the bar, swaying in the breeze of my newfound identity crisis.
But, as attentive readers have no doubt surmised, this isn't the very first time I've been called "obsessive." Any woman who has over 250 rose bushes in her yard, who would rather receive fifty sacks of steer manure for Christmas than a pair of emerald earrings, who has so much dirt in her car that the USDA pays her not to raise crops on the back seat, whose bare arms constantly look like she's been mud wrestling with a great white shark, who stays up half the night drooling over "rose porn" web sites and fantasizing about next year's new rose beds until she eventually falls asleep wearing her Felcos...such a woman is bound to be accused of obsession from time to time. So I knew exactly how to handle this latest episode.
"Hold on just a minute there, Sigmund," I said to Sherlock. "Before I reimburse you for that astute diagnosis, let's rule out the possibility of a few alternative conditions. Maybe instead of 'obsessive personality disorder,' I merely have a case of chronic enthusiasm. How do you know it's not acute dedication, or inflammatory determination? Could I possibly have come down with the dreaded Carpe Diem Syndrome? Have you considered that I might be suffering from delusionary Latissimus Dorsi hypertrophy? Or perhaps it's nothing more than a mild case of laundry-day procrastination."
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| Dr. Leda has mid-winter roses blooming outside her window. |
Of course, since I was straining to support my body weight from the chin-up bar with only one arm, that entire speech came out sounding like "Nnnnnnngggghh!" Sherlock gave me a wary look, shrugged his massive shoulders, and trundled away.
So why is it that when an activity brings us immense joy, when we develop a deep abiding interest and are happy to immerse ourselves in a task for hours at a time, somebody inevitably comes along and starts flinging around words like "obsession" and "addiction"? Why must our passions be pathologized?
Fellow rose fanatics, let us rise up! It's time for us to face the world and boldly reclaim our inalienable right to our own personal joie de vivres and raison d'etres.
I hereby present you with Dr. Leda's three-step strategy for applying a positive spin to even the most hard-core rose obsession:
Step One: Constantly remind everyone (including yourself) that it could always be worse. After all, growing roses isn't dangerous, or illegal, or fattening. Ok, it's not exactly a free hobby, but on the other hand, it's not like you're collecting Ferraris. Tell your loved ones to be thankful it's not heroin, or blackjack, or orchids.
Step Two: Distract them with something that really is worse. I'm particularly fond of this step, because whenever anybody (especially that stern little voice inside my own head) begins a sentence with, "A woman your age has NO business doing so-and-so..." I guarantee that so-and-so is about to become my very next obsession. Er, hobby.
"A woman your age has NO business taking up boxing!"
"A woman your age has NO business staying out until 2 a.m. dancing in zydeco clubs!"
"A woman your age has ABSOLUTELY no business even THINKING about giving up her career to become a honkytonk singer specializing in the early Decca hits of Webb Pierce (circa 1952-1955)."
Without fail, dear readers, I must always rise to the challenge.
But I assure you, it works. After a few months of relentless motorcycle racing, or breeding cottonmouths in the laundry room, or whatever alarming new pursuit has consumed your life, your friends and relations and inner voices will be so relieved when you announce that you're "just dropping by the nursery to see if any new roses have come in," they won't even notice that you're driving a U-Haul.
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| A heroic single rose blooms in December [35kb] |
Step Three: Become an expert on people who are even crazier than you are. You might start by reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles MacCay's hilarious classic narrative of such lemming-like follies as the hare-brained 17th century tulip mania. Did you know that at the height of the tulip craze, a single bulb could be traded for enough gold to feed and house an entire Dutch family for half a lifetime? Doesn't that make you feel like the Queen of Moderation?
Another of my favorites is a delightful book called Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, by David Weeks and Jamie James. This affectionate and entertaining work examines at length such charming crackpots as a woman who houses over 7,500 garden gnomes in her back yard; a man who lives, dresses, and acts as if it's always 1895; and a former ATM installer who quit his job, moved to Sherwood Forest, began dressing in green and carrying a longbow, and had his name legally changed to -- whoa, how did you guess? I don't care how many new roses you ordered this year, or if you had your name legally changed to "Miss All-American Beauty," or whether your monthly rose feedings are personally catered by Nigella Lawson herself: trust me, you're still not in the same league with these fruitcakes.
Finally, I always take great solace in marveling at the extreme excesses of my esteemed colleagues, the orchid maniacs. Many fascinating books have chronicled the mind-boggling "Orchidhead" phenomenon; two fun mesmerizing introductions to the dark demimonde of orchid insanity I particularly recommend are Eric Hansen's Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy, and The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsession, by Susan Orlean. I'll tell you what: rose people have nothing on these orchid fools. I mean, excuse me, I may be naive, but if there's an underground black market where illegally smuggled rose bushes are going for twenty grand apiece, don't you think I would have heard about it on the Gardenweb rose forums by now?
So the next time somebody mutters, "Isn't this rose thing is getting just a wee bit out hand?" you'll be strategically armed to nip that nonsense in the bud. Remember, rose buying season comes but once a year. Go forth, dear readers, and order with glee!
